History repeats itself. Vice President Dick Cheney is trying to bury a classified draft assessment by the CIA that shows Iran, like Iraq before it, might be telling the truth about it nuclear weapons program. Be sure to pick up the Nov. 27 issue of the New Yorker, with the full article by Seymour Hersh.

The C.I.A. found no conclusive evidence, as yet, of a secret Iranian nuclear-weapons program running parallel to the civilian operations that Iran has declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency….

But Cheney and the Bush administration aren’t going to let little details like the truth stop them from pursuing their goals, whatever the hell they are.

Cheney and his aides discounted the assessment, the former senior intelligence official said. “They’re not looking for a smoking gun,” the official added, referring to specific intelligence about Iranian nuclear planning. “They’re looking for the degree of comfort level they think they need to accomplish the mission.”

…Bush and Cheney, he added, can try to prevent the C.I.A. assessment from being incorporated into a forthcoming National Intelligence Estimate on Iranian nuclear capabilities, “but they can’t stop the agency from putting it out for comment inside the intelligence community.”

The C.I.A. assessment warned the White House that it would be a mistake to conclude that the failure to find a secret nuclear-weapons program in Iran merely meant that the Iranians had done a good job of hiding it.

The White House’s position is backed up by the one country in the Middle East that definitely does have nuclear weapons — Israel — that claims Iran is testing trigger devices for a bomb.

“The problem is that no one can verify it,” the former senior intelligence official told me. “We don’t know who the Israeli source is. The briefing says the Iranians are testing trigger mechanisms — simulating a zero-yield nuclear explosion without any weapons-grade materials — but there are no diagrams, no significant facts. Where is the test site? How often have they done it? How big is the warhead — a breadbox or a refrigerator? They don’t have that.” And yet, he said, the report was being used by White House hawks within the Administration to prove the White House’s theory that the Iranians are on track.

The Bushoids are seeing red at having their attempts to once again shape the intelligence exposed, and are taking the Rovian path of personally attacking the messenger. Even NPR’s Alex Chadwick, who interviewed Hersh, noticed.

Chadwick: “I’ll just note that the White House has responded to your article dismissing this classified CIA draft assessment but they’ve done it in what seems to me unusually harsh language.

“Here’s what White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said. Let me read this to you:

“‘The White House is not going to dignify the work of an author who has viciously degraded our troops and whose articles consistently rely on outright falsehoods to justify his radical views.’”

Hersh: “I think it says more about them than me…What is important here, and what you’re getting at, is they’re not answering the questions. Is there a classified report? Does it say something they don’t want people to know? Has the vice president in particular smothered this report?”

Looks like “yes” is the correct response for all of the above.